This seminar will focus on recent "perspectivist" approaches in the philosophy of science. These approaches attempt to make sense of why scientists so frequently understand a single phenomenon using multiple (perhaps seemingly incompatible) models. In doing so, they purport to help us understand the role of idealization, abstraction, and approximation in science. We will consider general arguments for and against perspectivist approaches, as well as how scientific perspectivism relates to other important debates in the philosophy of science (e.g., the realism debate). We will also consider how perspectivism fares when applied to particular case studies, likely with an emphasis on the biological sciences.
The central text will be Michela Massimi's Perspectival Realism (OUP 2022), supplemented by various other relevant papers.